The Proverbial Guides’ do? They took over 1 hr on the Treasure hunt, and even then we had to stop them for tea. And we got some very interesting spellings of ‘caravan’.

It took me until quite late in life to realise that spelling wasn’t really my forte (some of you may have noticed this by now, as I don’t always remember to spell check these entries). I was well into working life before I became any good at punctuation and it took even longer before I stopped being so smug about the mistakes other people made in either.

Looking back over the diary one of the most disappointing discoveries has been my handwriting. For years I harboured the delusion that, as a teenager, my writing had been quite neat and that it had only been ruined by my entry into a profession where rapid note taking was an essential part of the job. Now I know that there are only two significant differences, in that my writing is now a lot smaller and I write the letter ‘e’ differently.

Which is all rather frustrating to me. I don’t want to have beautiful, flowing, handwriting, but I would like to be able to read it occasionally. Knowing that it has always been like that and is nothing to do with my accidental career somehow pains me.